Arguments Against Using ICT in Education

There is a significant amount of literature discussing ineffectual uses and possible negative effects of use of ICT in education.

Annotated References

Alliance for Childhood [Online]. Accessed 12/23/04: http://www.allianceforchildhood.net/index.htm.
The Alliance for Childhood feels that there is overuse and
misuse of ICT in elementary school education. The following
is quoted from the Home Page of the Alliance for
Childhood:

The Alliance for Childhood is a partnership of
individuals and organizations committed to fostering and
respecting each child's inherent right to a healthy,
developmentally appropriate childhood.

The Alliance for Childhood and dozens of leading health, education and child development experts are challenging the increasing emphasis on computers in early childhood and elementary schools.

The Alliance for Childhood has also published a Sept. 30, 2004 report:

Chet Bowers is a professor (now retired) at Portland
State University in Oregon, and formerly was a Professor in
the College of Education at the University of Oregon. He has
long been a critic of IT in education and is author of a
number of books on this topic.

An extensive review by Bryan R. Warnick
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is
available online at: Accessed 7/21/01: http://coe.asu.edu/edrev/reviews/rev119.htm.
Quoting from the last two paragraphs of the review:

Bowers ends his book with seven important
points for educators. These seven points sum up his
major arguments. He argues that we should be aware:
(1) of the differences between Western technologies
and more ecologically sound cultures, (2) of
alternative approaches to technology when making
democratic decisions involving technology, (3) that
further study is needed on how modern technology
changes culture and commodifies relationships, (4)
that a more complex view of culture is needed than
what is currently presupposed by modern technology
enthusiasts, (5) that technology affects language
and thought patterns, (6) that issues of justice
arise when technology and the nature of work
intersect, and (7) that we should understand how
the computer carries cultural assumptions that
threaten diversity and sustainability.

This is sound advice. More importantly, though,
it seems that the main contribution of this book is
moving the discussion about technology in the
classroom toward dealing with how technology
affects language, metaphor, attitudes, and thus,
the social world. Computers, Bowers helps us
realize, are themselves educators. Computers make
moral, political, cultural, and environment
arguments, and it is time that these arguments were
discussed in the educational community. Bowers has
shown how such a discussion might proceed by
focusing on the arguments computers make in the
domain of ecology. But this is only one domain of
human interest, and the rest remains
unexplored.

Bowers, C.A. (1997). The Culture of Denial: Why the
Environmental Movement Needs A Strategy for Reforming
Universities and Public School.

From the back cover: "The Culture of Denial
is a deeply moral book, proposing educational reform
that is far more profound than the computer-mediated
technotrance or the 'culture wars' waged by modern
liberals and conservatives. Bowers argues persuasively
that only an ecosocial revitalization of education and
culture can solve the accumulating modern crises. I
hope this book becomes required reading at every
teachers' college and university." -- Charlen
Spretnak, author of Resurgence of the Real

From the foreword by Jonas F. Soltis: "In
this work, Bowers focuses on the ubiquitous computer
and its growing use in instruction. He asks us to
reflect on the computer as it mirrors our
twentieth-century technocratic mind-set. He argues
that its use reinforces and strengthens our
historical-cultural view of knowledge as power, as the
harbinger of progress, and our view of the individual
as autonomous and self-directed. He claims that it is
this same mind-set that has created a world of serious
ecological imbalance and cataclysmic nuclear threat,
as well as a breakdown of symbolic processes and a
loss of our sense of community. He urges use to think
of the computer as a mediator of culture as we
increasingly move to the full use of computers in
education."

The less pupils use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and maths, the largest study of its kind says today.

The findings raise questions over the Government's decision, announced by Gordon Brown in the Budget last week, to spend another £1.5 billion on school computers, in addition to the £2.5 billion it has already spent.

The researchers analysed the achievements and home backgrounds of 100,000 15-year-olds in 31 countries taking part in the Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) study in 2000 for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Pisa, to the British and many other governments' satisfaction, claimed that the more pupils used computers the better they did. It even suggested those with more than one computer at home were a year ahead of those who had none.

The study found this conclusion "highly misleading" because computer availability at home is linked to other family-background characteristics, in the same way computer availability at school is strongly linked to availability of other resources.

Once those influences were eliminated, the relationship between use of computers and performance in maths and literacy tests was reduced to zero, showing how "careless interpretations can lead to patently false conclusions".

From my point of view, such studies and conclusions fail to get at the most important idea, which is people learning to work effectively with ICT systems to solve challenging problems and accomplish challenging tasks.

Cuban, Larry

Larry Cuban has written and spoken extensively about the
pros versus the cons of use of IT in education. A few
references related to Cuban's work are given below.

C ount the reasons for continuing investments
of money in building a "hard" infrastructure of
wiring, servers, and new multimedia machines and a
"soft" infrastructure of technical support and
professional development. Each reason for spending
money has so little evidence to support the investment
that it is like buying dot-com stocks that lose money
year after year. It is, as Federal Reserve Board
Chairman Alan Greenspan once said about the stock
market, "an irrational exuberance." What are the
reasons for investing in technology in schools?

(The article continues with an analysis of a
sequence of asserted reasons for investing in
technology versus the facts.)

Cuban, Larry. (2001). Oversold and Underused:
Computers in the Classroom. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press. A review of this book is available at: Accessed
6/13/02: http://coe.asu.edu/edrev/reviews/rev168.htm.
Quoting from the review:

To find out if computers are changing
education practice, Stanford historian of technology
in education, Larry Cuban, took a look at the impact
of computers in the community where extensive
integration seems most likely. He looked into the
preschools, Kindergartens and secondary schools where
the people who develop the new technologies send their
children. He also looked at Stanford University, an
institution that feeds the developers of the high tech
industries of the Silicon Valley region of California.

At every level he examined, there was the
unexpected outcome: "In the schools we studied, we
found no clear and substantial evidence of students
increasing their academic achievement as a result of
using information technologies." (p. 133) So where is
the problem? Not in lack of access: "Students and
teachers had access to computers and related
technologies available in both their homes and their
schools." (p. 132)

Cuban also rejects the most common response from
critics of the schools, what he calls the "blame and
train" approach--technophobic teachers who must be
forced to be trained. He found little evidence of
resistance by teachers to using technology. In fact,
many used it extensively to prepare their work,
communicate with parents, colleagues and students,
maintain records, and carry out research. However,
"less than 5 percent of teachers integrated computer
technology into their curriculum and instructional
routines." (p. 133) In fact, "the overwhelming
majority of teachers employed the technology to
sustain existing patterns of teaching rather than to
innovate." (p. 134)

Cuban does not find that result disturbing--or even
surprising. In his previous studies of the
introduction of new technologies over the past
century, the results were similar. This happened with
radio, film, television and the early use of large
"main frame" computers. Promoters claimed that each
new technology would revolutionize schools. In fact,
each received some use, but within the context of
existing instructional practices.

Examining a century of university history,
Larry Cuban tackles the age-old question: What is more
important, teaching or research? Using two different
departments (history and medicine) at Stanford
University as a case study, Cuban shows how
universities have organizationally and politically
subordinated teaching to research for over one hundred
years. He explains how university reforms, decade
after decade, not only failed to dislodge the primacy
of research but actually served to strengthen it. He
examines the academic work of research and teaching to
determine how each has influenced university
structures and processes, including curricular reform.
Can the dilemma of scholars vs. teachers ever be fully
reconciled? This fascinating historical journey is a
must read for all university administrators, faculty,
researchers, and anyone concerned with educational
reform.

This article starts out by discussing Canadian schools, and includes some data on them. 3/4 of school age children have access to the internet at home, and the compuer ratio in schools is 1 per 5 students. The article then discusses a large international study that contains informatoin arguing against overly extensive use of computers in schools. Quoting from the article:

Perhaps the most persuasive evidence for taking a more critical view is a broad-reaching and rigorous study published last November. University of Munich economists Thomas Fuchs and Ludger Woessmann analyzed the results of the OECD's PISA international standardized tests. Not only did they tap into a massive subject pool -- 174,000 15-year-olds in reading, 97,000 each in math and science from 31 countries (including Canada) -- but they were also able, because participants filled out extensively detailed surveys, to control for other possible outside influences, something remarkably few studies do. Their results, which are only now starting to make waves among pedagogy experts, confirm what many parents have long intuited: the sheer ubiquity of information technology is getting in the way of learning. Once household income and the wealth of a school's resources are taken out of the equation, teens with the greatest access to computers and the Internet at home and school earn the lowest test scores.

This book offers some interesting insights for
the discussion of what role computers can and should play
in schools. Some of the articles are clearly outdated
because computers have changed so much since this was
written in 1985. But particularly the philosophical
treatise by Maxine Green and the articles from Vito
Perrone, Mary Crist and Cecelia Traugh are still very
relevant simply because the issues they raise have only
become more acute since then.

Hetzner, Amy (8/20/05). Is technology in schools the future or just a fad? It's still unclear if computers upgrade academics. This is a three part series being published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Online. Accessed 8/28/05: http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/aug05/349816.asp

The first article contains data on Wisconsin having one computer per three students and the US having roughly one computer per four students. The general flavor of the article is that we have little evidence that this large investment in technology is improving education. There is a quote from Larry Cuban that suggests he believes we are making improvements in our use of computer technology in schools.

This book offers a feminist critique of the role
of technology in pedagogy. It incorporates elements of
critical pedagogy with a feminist focus on re-embodying
the education system and the way we perceive ourselves in
relation to science and technology. I think this resource
could be very valuable for evaluating what technology is
doing for teaching from a feminist perspective, although
its focus is broader than mere educational technology.

This article sparked widespread reaction and
debate at the time it was published. It summarizes many
of the arguments against widespread use of computers in
schools. Quoting from the abstract:

There is no good evidence that most uses of
computers significantly improve teaching and learning,
yet school districts are cutting programs -- music,
art, physical education -- that enrich children's
lives to make room for this dubious nostrum, and the
Clinton Administration has embraced the goal of
"computers in every classroom" with credulous and
costly enthusiasm.

Quoting the first two paragraphs of the article:

In 1922 Thomas Edison predicted that "the
motion picture is destined to revolutionize our
educational system and ... in a few years it will
supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of
textbooks." Twenty-three years later, in 1945, William
Levenson, the director of the Cleveland public
schools' radio station, claimed that "the time may
come when a portable radio receiver will be as common
in the classroom as is the blackboard." Forty years
after that the noted psychologist B. F. Skinner,
referring to the first days of his "teaching
machines," in the late 1950s and early 1960s, wrote,
"I was soon saying that, with the help of teaching
machines and programmed instruction, students could
learn twice as much in the same time and with the same
effort as in a standard classroom." Ten years after
Skinner's recollections were published, President Bill
Clinton campaigned for "a bridge to the twenty-first
century ... where computers are as much a part of the
classroom as blackboards." Clinton was not alone in
his enthusiasm for a program estimated to cost
somewhere between $40 billion and $100 billion over
the next five years. Speaker of the House Newt
Gingrich, talking about computers to the Republican
National Committee early this year, said, "We could do
so much to make education available twenty-four hours
a day, seven days a week, that people could literally
have a whole different attitude toward learning."

If history really is repeating itself, the schools
are in serious trouble. In Teachers and Machines: The
Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920 (1986), Larry
Cuban, a professor of education at Stanford University
and a former school superintendent, observed that as
successive rounds of new technology failed their
promoters' expectations, a pattern emerged. The cycle
began with big promises backed by the technology
developers' research. In the classroom, however,
teachers never really embraced the new tools, and no
significant academic improvement occurred. This
provoked consistent responses: the problem was money,
spokespeople argued, or teacher resistance, or the
paralyzing school bureaucracy. Meanwhile, few people
questioned the technology advocates' claims. As
results continued to lag, the blame was finally laid
on the machines. Soon schools were sold on the next
generation of technology, and the lucrative cycle
started all over again.

Oppenheimer, Todd (2003). The Flickering Mind. .For some informatoin about this book see the newspaper article By Bob Blaisdell, Special to The Christian Science Monitor, Accessed 10/21/03: http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1014/p20s02-lecl.htm. Quoting from the article:

What impact has computer technology had on public education in the US? That's the question journalist Todd Oppenheimer sets out to answer in "The Flickering Mind."

Mr. Oppenheimer's conclusion: Putting computers in classrooms has been almost entirely wasteful, and the rush to keep schools up-to-date with the latest technology has been largely pointless.

"At this early stage of the personal computer's history, the technology is far too complex and error prone to be smoothly integrated into most classrooms," Oppenheimer writes. "While the technology business is creatively frantic, financially strapped public schools cannot afford to keep up with the innovations."

Neil Postman, a prolific and influential social critic and educator best known for his warning that an era of mass communications is stunting the minds of children  as well as adults  died on Sunday at a hospital in Flushing, Queens. He was 72 and lived in Flushing.

The cause was lung cancer, said a spokesman for New York University, where Dr. Postman taught for more than 40 years.

He held a chair in the field he called media ecology, and his career was a long-distance joust with what he saw as the polluting effects of television.

Dr. Postman's core message was that an immersion in a media environment shaped children's lives to their detriment, and society's.

Postman, Neil (Denver, Colorado, March 27, 1998). Five
Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.Quoting
from the Website:

The first idea is that all technological
change is a trade-off. I like to call it a Faustian
bargain. Technology giveth and technology taketh away.
This means that for every advantage a new technology
offers, there is always a corresponding disadvantage.
The disadvantage may exceed in importance the
advantage, or the advantage may well be worth the
cost. Now, this may seem to be a rather obvious idea,
but you would be surprised at how many people believe
that new technologies are unmixed blessings. You need
only think of the enthusiasms with which most people
approach their understanding of computers. Ask anyone
who knows something about computers to talk about
them, and you will find that they will, unabashedly
and relentlessly, extol the wonders of computers. You
will also find that in most cases they will completely
neglect to mention any of the liabilities of
computers. This is a dangerous imbalance, since the
greater the wonders of a technology, the greater will
be its negative consequences.

Roszak, Theodore (1986) The Cult of Information: A Neo
Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and
the True Art of Thinking. New York: Pantheon Books.

From the back cover: "As we devote
ever-increasing resources to providing, or prohibiting,
access to information via computer, Theodore Roszak
reminds us that voluminous information does not
necessarily lead to sound thinking. "Data Glut" obscures
basic questions of justice and purpose and may even
hinder rather enhance our productivity. In this revised
and updated edition (2nd) of The Cult of Information,
Rosak examines the place of computer technology in our
culture in the 1990's"

Roger Shanks is a strong proponent of use of
computers in education, but a strong oponent of misuse.
His articles tend to include a strong emphasis on minuse.
Quoting from this brief article:

Recently ads have been running in prestigious
newspapers asking: "If computers in the schools are
the answer, are we asking the right question?" It is a
call to parents to take action against the tremendous
expenditures being made to get computers into the
schools. The ad brings up the issue of whether
computers are really all that valuable in schools and
suggests that they may even be harmful.

This is an important issue and it matters that
people understand it properly. The organizations that
sponsored this ad are probably well meaning enough.
The recent findings they cite to support their
arguments against using computers in the schools are
accurate and right headed. Nevertheless, the message
is dead wrong and its writers need to understand
why.

Computers are being used in the schools in the
wrong way. They are being put in the schools at
tremendous expense because educators and politicians
see computers as a way of improving education without
really knowing why.

Access to the Web is often cited as being very
important to education, for example, but is it? The
problem in the schools is not that the libraries are
insufficient. The Web is, at its best, an improvement
on information access. It provides a better library
for kids, but the library wasn't what was broken.

Computer programs that teach math are often cited
as being improvements in education. But the ad cites
studies that say these programs are of no proven
value, that they really don't improve a student's
performance in math. Are they right? Probably. But
again, the problem is that they have misunderstood the
issue.

Computers will save our schools -- eventually. But
they will definitely not save our schools by raising
math scores. Saying that computers don't raise math
scores as a way of criticizing computers is like
saying that computers don't make the food in the
school cafeteria taste better. No, they don't, but
should they?

Sloan, Douglas (1985). The Computer in Education: A
Critical Perspective New York: Teachers College Press.

There is no doubt as to what perspective this
collection of articles comes from. It offers a wide
variety of arguments that tend to imply a desire for less
computers in schools. Most discussions are quite thorough
and the authors make very compelling arguments. Once
again, the fact that this was published in 1985 does not
change the conclusions reached (if anything, things have
gotten worse than anticipated back then...), although the
details may be from the past.

From Booklist. When a computer expert has second
thoughts about the information highway, we should slow
down and listen. Stoll is skeptical of the overblown
promises of technology mavens, government officials,
industry hacks, and educators that, he says, first
produce bloated expectations and then burst bubbles.
"Lotus-eaters, beware," he writes, virtual reality is no
substitute for the real thing: computers alter our
thinking processes; they isolate us and minimize social
interactions; they are expensive and difficult to use;
and they become obsolete in a few years. The Internet is
a disorganized waste land, and E-mail isn't as good as
the U.S. Postal Service. In chapter 11, Stoll expresses
fear for the future of libraries: too much of libraries'
resources are being devoted to technology, he says, and
not enough to books and librarians. Ultimately, though,
Stoll contradicts himself too often: in one sentence, he
fears the demise of libraries; in the next, he states why
book-based libraries won't disappear. What's more, he
undermines his argument's seriousness with comic
footnotes and deliberately improper grammar. Still, his
book signals the first wave in the backlash against the
race to the future that computer technology now
represents. Benjamin Segedin --This text refers to the
Hardcover edition.

This book has an interesting thesis,
which could be grossly simplified to be that education
is in itself a form of technology that manipulates the
world and is in turn manipulated by it. The author
examines various writers' perspectives and puts them
into his own account in a very compelling and
interesting way. This is clearly a book about the
philosophy of technology but it has some very deep
insights into what the role of technology in
conjunction with education can and should be.

Educators may be pillars of the community, but
their discourse is as mercurial as Paris fashion.
Desperate to find a magic bullet to cure education's
woes, many are willing to embrace new curricula and
unproven pedagogies, believing that anything different
must necessarily be good. Educators' current fascination
with technology is a vivid example.

There was a time, not long ago, when advocates of
educational technology gushed about the prospect of
schoolchildren exchanging e-mails with world-class
experts on everything. The idea was exciting, even if
these world-class experts were hard-pressed to find time
to reply to e-mails from each other, let alone from tens
of millions of American schoolchildren. Eventually, that
rosy vision receded into the distance.